1. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to automatic test equipment and more particularly to generation of signals for testing semiconductor devices.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Semiconductor devices are tested, often multiple times, during their manufacture. A piece of automatic test equipment, referred to as “ATE” or a “tester,” is used to generate test signals that stimulate a device under test (DUT) and to measure a response from the DUT. The tester determines whether the DUT is operating properly by comparing the response evoked by a carefully controlled pattern of test signals with an expected response.
To fully test devices, the tester should generate and measure signals like those in the intended operating environment of those devices. Because numerous types of semiconductor devices need to be tested, automatic test equipment is designed to be programmable so that it may generate or measure the signals needed to test any desired type of semiconductor device.
Further, the test signals must be generated accurately. Inaccurate test signals lead to inaccurate test results, which in turn can lead to semiconductor devices that actually perform as expected being classified as defective devices and discarded. Inaccuracy in test signals may also create uncertainty in test results such that, for some subset of devices tested, it is impossible to determine whether the device operates as expected. When uncertainty precludes a determination of whether a device is operating correctly, the device is classified as defective and discarded. Therefore, inaccurate signal generation in a tester can have a high cost associated with it.
Sinusoidal signals are one type of signal frequently generated within a tester. For example, a sinusoidal signal may be applied to the device under test so that the response by the device to the sinusoidal signal may be measured. In other instances, the sinusoidal signal is used for timing signals that are applied to the device under test.
Regardless of how the sinusoidal signal is used as a test signal, inaccuracies in generating the signal can impact the test results. If the sinusoidal signal is applied directly to the device under test, the measured response may not be as expected—not because the device is defective, but because the test signal was not as expected. If the sinusoidal signal is used for timing other events, the expected response may not be detected—not because the device failed to produce the response, but because the tester measured the response at the wrong time. Accordingly, accurate generation of programmable sinusoidal signals is important in many aspects of an automatic test system.
Some testers use direct digital synthesis (DDS) to generate sinusoidal signals of programmable frequency. A traditional approach for generating a sinusoidal signal using DDS is to store in a look-up table values representing a cycle of a sinusoidal signal. A phase accumulator periodically generates phase values that act as addresses to the look-up table. The value in the accumulator increases each period by a programmed phase increment. When the values from the phase accumulator are used to address the look-up table, the output of the look-up table is a sequence of values representing points on a sine wave that are spaced in phase by the phase increment. To produce a periodic signal, the phase accumulator uses modular arithmetic when it increases the accumulated phase by the phase increment. When adding the phase increment to the accumulated phase would result in a phase value beyond the end of one cycle of the sine wave, the phase accumulator converts that phase value to a phase value an equivalent distance from the start of the cycle that is stored in the look-up table.
The magnitude of that programmed phase increment controls the length of time it takes for the output of the look-up table to trace out one cycle of the sine wave. This time is inversely proportional to the frequency of the sine wave generated so that specifying the phase increment provides a mechanism to program the frequency of the sine wave.
The values in the series output from the look-up table may be converted to an analog signal, which is a sine wave of the programmed frequency.